The Deepest Secret Nobody Knows
by em-witchwood
Summary: The dead do not come back. Not as anything you want back. RizaPride!Ed RoyPride!Ed, past EdRoyRiza, RoyEd, and EdRiza
1. Chapter 1

**The Deepest Secret Nobody Knows**

* * *

It wasn't Ed. She knew it wasn't Ed.

"Hello there."

Edward was dead. She had seen Archer pull the trigger, watched the blood spray over Winry's jacket, over Winry's face. Watched Ed's body jerk with the second shot, spin with the third and fall with the forth. Gold eyes wide with shock, hair and coat swirling with obscene grace as he fell, the world slowed to a crawl.

"You look cold."

She had heard Winry's scream, she had _felt_ Alphonse's scream. Grief and horror that tore through her, that echoed in her ears still. She hadn't even realized she had reached Archer, was shooting him, again and again and again, until Havoc came up behind her and grabbed her arms, took the gun from her hands and tried to pull her against his chest.

"It's raining."

She had broken away from him, ran over to the crumpled form in the middle of the alley, fallen to her knees and dragged him up into her arms, out of the puddle of blood already forming around him. His eyes had been open, glazed and sightless. She had closed them before Alphonse reached them, before Winry pushed herself to her hands and knees and crawled over, and with them closed he'd _almost_ looked peaceful, almost looked like maybe he was just sleeping.

She held out her hand, ignored the wetness on her cheeks, told herself it was just the rain.

"Why don't you come inside?"

She knew it wasn't Edward, but it looked so much like him.

The scantily clad figure curled into a ball at the mouth of the alley looked at her with wide, eerily blank gold eyes, studied her offered hand curiously.

"Come on. I won't hurt you."

An arm covered in intricate black lines unwrapped from around the creature's knees and a small, cool hand was placed in hers.

* * *

"What's your name?" she asked him, because she didn't want to call him Edward, not even in her head.

She had given him a towel, and when he had only stared at it blankly, she had dried him off herself. He hadn't protested. Now he had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and he was sitting at her kitchen table, his eyes tracking her every movement.

"Pride." he said. His voice was soft, without infliction. After a pause, he realized it was his turn to talk, and he asked, "What is your name?"

"Riza." She smiled at him.

He smiled back automatically. Childlike and innocent and utterly unlike Edward. There was no wariness in his eyes, no aggression. There was nothing at all. He swung his legs back and forth, watched her set the kettle to boil.

"Are you hungry?"

He seemed to have to think about this, put one hand over his stomach and tilted his head, as if trying to decide. "I… don't know."

She fed him sticky buns and tea. She did not think about-

"_Hey, Captain. Wha'cha writing?" Edward asked. He plopped himself down in front of her, snagged a pastry out of the bakery box. _

"_The General's To Do List." she muttered. _

"_Oh yeah. You're going out of town tomorrow, aren't you?"_

"_Yes. To see my grandfather." _

"_Huh." Ed popped another pastry in his mouth, reached over and patted her arm. "Don't worry. I'll keep General Lazy Ass in line for you." _

_Riza finished the list, capped her pen and handed both to Ed. She said, quietly enough that only Ed could hear her, "Tell him that if he doesn't finish this list, he gets no sex from either of us for a month."_

_They shared conspiratorial smiles that made the soldiers nearest them scoot surreptitiously away. _

-because that was over. Edward was dead.

She made him a spot on the couch. She had never done that before. Whenever Ed had stayed over they'd always shared the small bed, shifted and twisted, fought over pillows and woke each other in the middle of the night with flailing limbs.

Pride slept still as death.

When she woke the next morning, he was gone.

* * *

If she was distracted at the office the next day, no one mentioned it. They didn't take advantage of her distraction either, instead stayed on their best behavior. Just like on the days that Roy stared right through them and they said nothing, just went about their work with their hearts in their throats and a name no one ever mentioned anymore repeating endlessly through their minds.

Two men had been found dead a block away from where she had found Pride.

* * *

He came back, of course, as strays did when you were foolish enough to feed them.

So she fed him (though she knew, from consulting Edward's notes, that homunculi did not need to eat human food), and she talked to him. Or rather, she talked at him. He rarely talked back. He followed her around her apartment like a puppy, watched her fold laundry and change the light bulbs in her bathroom. While she cooked, he sat cross-legged on the floor and played with Black Hayate, who seemed willing to ignore the fact that he was a soulless monster that smelled like blood and alchemy as long as he scratched behind his ears. Pride's expressions were childlike but muted, and his eyes were always blank.

She told herself, at first, that she was gaining his trust bit by bit so that she could gather information on the other homunculi and Father.

One night Pride looked up from his game of tug-a-war with Hayate and said, "You work for the Flame Alchemist."

"Yes."

"Do you like working for him?"

"Not really." Riza admitted. "I don't enjoy being a soldier. But I believe in him, and in his ideals."_ You believed in him once, Edward. _

"I work for Master." Pride said matter of factly.

"Why?"

Pride watched Hayate wag his whole body back and forth trying to get the sock from the homunculus's distracted grip. "Because…" Pride's expression was blanker than ever. "…she made me."

* * *

Pride became a regular fixture in her life. She was no longer surprised to come home and find him lounging on her sofa, or sitting on the floor playing with Black Hayate. She noticed that as time went by, he talked more. His words had a stilted, hesitant feel. As if conversation was something new and foreign that he wasn't sure how to go about. At first, he didn't talk about the other homunculi. He spoke instead of the people he saw while he was carrying out the tasks that his master gave him, about the things they did or said that he did not understand. About the strange little girl who had given him sweets when he got her toy down from where her brother and his friends had tossed it on the roof to be cruel. About the strange man who tried to touch him while he walked down an alley ("He called me 'pretty thing' and smiled at me funny, and tried to grab me, so I killed him." and Riza shivered at the matter-of-fact way he said it.). Eventually, little bits about his fellow Sins slipped through. A particularly nasty thing Envy had said, a strange thing Greed had done.

"He acts… more human than the rest of us. I suppose that is because of how Master made him. The human he was still lives inside him."

"And you?" she asked before she could stop herself. "What of the human that you were?"

Pride shrugged. "He is dead." And for a moment- just a moment, the barest fraction of a second- there was a sharp, burning intelligence in Pride's eyes. "The dead do not come back." Then it was gone, the blank shield slamming down, intelligence turning to innocent curiosity. "Did you know him, the human that I was?"

Lying was not an option. "Yes."

"Hm." Pride tilted his head. "Did you know him well? Is that why you brought me in, that first night?"

"I knew him well." _I loved you. Maybe not as much as I loved Roy, but I loved you._ "But that's not why I took you in."

"Why did you?"

"Because it was wet, and it was cold."

"It would not have hurt me."

"That's not the point. You were cold and wet, and you looked lonely."

There was a long silence while Pride digested this. Then, "Can homunculi be lonely?"

"You would have to answer that."

Pride was silent for the rest of the night.

* * *

Pride often went through her things if he arrived at her apartment before her. It was how she finally got unpacked. He would go through the boxes, leave knick-knacks and lingerie strewn about the living room, page through romance novels and leave them in precarious towers near the foot of the couch. One day he discovered her photos, and she found him sprawled on the floor like a child, his nose inches away from the colored prints. She let him look while she changed out of her uniform and started dinner. When the meal was almost ready, she told him to stack the pictures up neatly and come to the table. He set the table without having to be told, and Riza didn't let herself notice that he knew what dishes to use for the informal meal, or that he snuck a piece of beef from the stew and gave it to Hayate, as Edward used to do.

While helping her with the dishes, Pride said, "He was happy."

She asked, "Who?"

"The human that I was. He was… happy, and very sad." Pride scrubbed a pot idly. "I don't know what it feels like to be happy, or to be sad. But in those pictures he always looks both."

"You're never sad?"

Pride shrugged. "I don't know what sadness feels like, but I watch people, so I know what it looks like. And he looked sad."

"You looked sad, when I fist saw you."

"So did you."

* * *

Blood on his thighs. On his face. On his hands.

Blood on her floor, but it was linoleum, it would wash off.

Panic spiked through her, and she forgot for a moment just what he was. (She remembered Edward's blood on her hands. Alphonse's scream. Roy's hitched breath that was almost a sob as he reached the scene, too late.) "What happened?" she asked, already on her knees beside him, tilting his face up to the light to see the damage. There was none, but her heart stayed lodged in her throat. ("No. No no no." Roy's voice was a broken rasp. He leaned down to press his lips to the pale forehead, the cold lips, and Riza watched his face, and knew she had lost them both.)

"I made Envy mad." Pride said. "I told him he was wrong. Envy doesn't like it when I argue with him."

"What was he wrong about?"

"While he was touching me, he said that the Flame Alchemist used to do the same thing. That he used me the same way. I told him it wasn't the same." Pride looked at her, eyes desperate. "It _wasn't_ the same, was it? He was lying, wasn't he?"

"Edward and Colonel Mustang-"

"But it wasn't the _same_, right?" Pride grabbed her arm, his fingers digging in so hard she almost cried out in pain. "It wasn't- he wasn't-"

"No. It wasn't the same."

Real relief in his eyes. He let go of her arm.

A thousand questions and half-formed suspicions surged forward. _What if…?_ The most dangerous question of all, and she knew she should cut off the train of thought. She knew she shouldn't ask- but there are some things you have to do, no matter how stupid they are."Pride. How- How do you know it was different?"

"I…" Pride stopped. The sharpness flickered through his eyes. Finally, he shook his head, frowned. "You." he said. "The way you talk about them. You aren't the kind of person that would let people you love hurt each other."

"Why… Why does it matter to you, that it was different?"

"… When Envy touches me like that, I feel hot and cold all over, and my stomach hurts." Shame, but he didn't recognize it, and Riza couldn't bring herself to name it for him. "It hurts, inside." His face twisted, and he wrapped his arms around his stomach tightly. "But I think about- about the Flame Alchemist, and about what it would be like if he touched me like that, like Envy does, and that hurts worse."

There were tears in her eyes again. She couldn't stop them. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pulled him into her embrace. He let her, sank into her with a long breath that could have been a sigh.

She cried into his hair, rocked him back and forth. She cried for him, for the grief she had seen in his eyes while he talked that he didn't know how to acknowledge or express.

(And for her own grief. For the memory of a teenage boy that smelled like steel and sunshine, that lived life so_ hard_, so fiercely, that gave and gave and gave and died in an alley with a bullet through his heart.)

**

* * *

**

**Author's Notes: **This idea came to me somewhere between Oregon and Montana. But I couldn't actually get started writing it until Nebraska. Due to the massive mountain of boxes teetering just a few feet away, updates will be sporadic.


	2. Chapter 2

**The Deepest Secret Nobody Knows**

* * *

Death came in dreams.

It nipped at his heels as he hurried down crowded city streets, loomed over his shoulder as he trudged through deserted ruins, whispered teasingly in his ear as he flipped through dusty books whose pages crumbled when he turned them.

Death watched and death waited. Patient. Unhurried. Death knew that in the end all things belonged to It.

He danced through fights where the odds were stacked against him, his blood singing in his ears as adrenaline pumped through him. Copper taste on his tongue, red on the blade his arm had become. He scrambled for handholds as the earth fell away beneath him, dodged bullets as hastily put together plans fell apart.

In the background, there was a familiar but not familiar voice shouting, "Brother!" Young and scared, but _he_ wasn't scared. He hadn't made things right yet, and he wasn't going to die until he did.

And when he didn't fight hard enough or run fast enough and the bullets bit into his flesh or the blade sank into his side, and he slipped closer to Death, close enough to feel Its touch, It stared. Not amused or vindictive but imperturbable. Ineffable. Inevitable.

He escaped Its grasping arms and hurried into other arms. Slim, smooth arms and golden hair like his own. Soft, soft lips pressed chastely against his and girlish laughter when he ran steel fingers up a flat stomach. Strong, pale arms and a deep, low voice whispering things that made his stomach twist in such a _good_ way, rough scrape of teeth down his throat and a hand caught in his hair. Three sets of limbs tangled together under the sheets. A warm feeling he didn't recognize.

And then, after waiting so long and so patiently, after lulling him into complacency, Death snapped out, flash fast, snapping rubber band quick- _A man with cold blue eyes and a flat snake smile raising a gun. A girl cowering back, eyes wide and struck through with horror. And he was running, running, heart pounding and everything gone quiet, still, clear as he put himself between girl and man. He met the man's snake-flat eyes and the shot was loud but not loud enough to drown out the hoarse screams of, "Brother!" of "ED!"_-and closed over him, black heavy silence and then white aching emptiness and then-

Pride opened his eyes. Immediately awake and immediately aware of what had woke him.

Mismatched footsteps coming up the stairs behind him. Metal and flesh. _Thump clank thump clank thump clank._ Wrath.

Pride breathed in, breathed out. Relaxed. It wasn't Envy or Sloth. It wouldn't do for them to see him sleeping. Homunculi did not need sleep. Their days and nights blended together, one indistinguishable from the other in the underground city, an endless, merciless flow of minutes and hours, unbroken by oblivion.

But Pride had watched the Child sleep, listened to his breathing slow and mimicked it, closed his eyes and cleared his mind. He wasn't sure if he slept or just dreamed, but he knew the others did neither.

He straightened up and veiled his eyes, looked out over the empty streets and waited for the smaller Sin to reach him.

"Pride."

Pride kept his eyes blank, kept them focused ahead on nothing.

"Pride!"

He blinked, turned his head slowly and stared. "Yes, Wrath?"

"Master wants you. _Now._"

Pride looked back to the streets, closed his eyes again. Saw, for just a second, the glint of sunlight off steel, heard laughter that echoed as it rose up from an empty shell. "Alright."

* * *

It was wet. It was dark. It was cold.

("You looked lonely."

"Can homunculi be lonely?")

Pride held his arms out, tilted his face up to the sky and let the rain wash the red off. He wished he was like the witch in the Child's book, wished the rain could make him melt away.

"What are you _doing_?"

Pride didn't answer. What could he say? _I'm washing the blood off, you stupid fuck, what does it look like I'm doing?_ The words of someone else, someone gone, rising up like bile in his throat and he swallowed them down. It was better, smarter, if he didn't answer. Envy preferred it when he didn't answer.

("_What_ did you just say?"

"I said, it wasn't like-"

A vicious backhanded slap cut off the rest of the words.)

Cold hands grabbed his wrists, pulled his arms down to his sides and held them there. "How many people did you kill tonight?" Envy asked, lips against Pride's ear.

He didn't struggle away from Envy, didn't tense up. He answered, with no sarcasm at all, "Was I supposed to be keeping count?"

Envy laughed, delighted. It had confused Pride when he did that the first time, but the more time he spent with Riza, the more he learned and the more he dreamed, the more he understood. Envy delighted in what he thought Edward Elric had become. Master's puppet. Envy's whore. A pretty doll that murdered on command.

But Edward Elric was dead. Pride was Pride, not Edward, not Lieutenant Colonel Elric or Fullmetal or Brother or Ed. (_Not Love or Lover or Loved. Black eyes watching him and careful fingers moving inside him, heat shooting up his spine and he wanted- he wanted- That warm feeling again, spreading from his center out as he was kissed over his hair._) Pride was Pride, and maybe he was a puppet, maybe he was a whore, but he had no soul to stain, no innocence to be destroyed.

He closed his eyes as Envy pushed him down and reminded himself it didn't matter.

What else was there?

(Death chased him in dreams, but in his waking moments, It kept Its distance, turned Its face away.)

* * *

"I'm cold." the Child whimpered, and stumbled in his effort to keep up with Envy's quick stride.

"Too fucking bad!" Envy snapped. Pride saw the older Sin clench his fist against the urge to hit their charge.

Pride didn't dare suggest they make the boy more comfortable. Envy was already in a foul mood, and Pride didn't want Envy to turn that foul mood on him. Instead, he just slipped his hand down to the back of the Child's neck, squeezed lightly. A gentle warning.

Envy stopped when the alley intersected another. With a brief flash and crackle of energy, he changed form, becoming a matronly woman with pale blonde hair pulled back into a tight bun. "You know what to do, Pride?" he asked.

Pride nodded.

"Don't screw up." Envy said, pulling an ill-fitting tweed coat about himself tightly and hurrying off in one direction, while Pride took the Child's hand and went in the other.

When he judged they were far enough away, and was sure Envy hadn't doubled back to watch them, he stopped. "Are you still cold?" he asked.

The child started a little, blinked up at him. He obviously had not expected Pride to speak without prompting. "Y-Yes."

Pride unzipped his own jacket, then lifted the Child up easily and settled him on his hip, pulled the jacket shut over both of them as much as he could. After a moment's hesitation, the child wrapped his arms around Pride's neck and rested his cheek on the Sin's shoulder. It was a novel sensation, having that fragile bundle of warmth in his arms. It made him think, of all things, of the armor he saw in Riza's photos.

"Is that better?" he asked.

The Child nodded.

Pride started walking again. "We'll find you a coat." Pride was surprised Master had not thought to give him one, with how she usually coddled him. She was growing more and more distracted of late. Pride saw the plans moving behind her eyes, the gleam of madness growing brighter day-by-day.

They came onto a busy street crowded with cheerful shops. An outdoor grill belched the stink of fried onions and some sort of meat product, a large truck rumbled past, spewing black exhaust. The Child looked around with wide, fascinated eyes. His nose wrinkled at the unfamiliar smells, and his hands held onto Pride a little tighter. Pride reflected that the boy had likely not been out of the underground city since his mother had been lured down there with him in her arms. How long ago had that been? Pride did not know. The child was nearly six years old, how long…?

"Where are we going, Pride?" the Child asked.

"We are going to meet Lust." Pride said. He saw a man with shifty, red-rimmed eyes bump into a young woman, then duck into an alley across the street, remembered the Child's lack of outerwear. He crossed the street quickly.

"What-?"

"Shhh."

The Child went silent. They followed the man down the alley, then across another street, down another alley. The city grew seedier around them. Finally, when he deemed it was deserted enough, Pride jumped and grabbed the bottom rung of what was left of a fire-escape ladder, pulled himself and the Child silently up. From there he leapt to the roof of the building. He set the Child down.

"Wait here." he said.

It was an easy matter to sneak up behind the man, reach out with his small hands and snap the man's neck, rifle through his cache of stolen wallets and take the cash he found for himself, then return to the Child and head back to the more crowded streets. It felt strange to be doing something that he hadn't been ordered to. He hadn't realized he could do things on his own initiative.

He took the Child into a shop that sold children's clothes, bought him a black down coat, bright orange knit hat and gloves, jeans, a t-shirt, a pair of sneakers that weren't a size too small. (The Child tugged on Pride's own jacket and scarf, said tentatively, "Now we match.") They still had a couple hours to kill, and there was a small deli across the street from the store. Pride bought them lunch, and ended up giving his to the Child. He didn't need it, and the little boy was starving.

Again, Pride wondered at his Master's oversight. The Child was important to her plans, and yet she had grown so careless of his health, leaving Pride and his fellow Sins to care for the boy. But homunculi do not get cold, do not get hungry, do not get tired or sick. Once Master had been sure to check on the Child and make sure his needs were met, but lately the Sins had been growing lax with their care of the boy and Master had not noticed.

As they left the deli, the Child took his hand, smiled up at him hugely, and Pride wished he wouldn't, even as he smiled back.

When Lust saw the Child's new apparel, she looked between Pride and his charge, her gaze speculative. "Get the urge to do a bit of shopping?" she asked.

"His clothes were too small." Pride said without inflection.

Lust raised a perfectly arched brow. "Hm." She straightened from where she was slouched against the wall, smoothed down her coat. "You know what to do?" she asked.

Pride nodded.

Lust looked down at the Child. "Come here, boy. Do _you_ remember what to do?"

The Child nodded, released Pride's hand with obvious reluctance and made his way over to Lust.

"Good. No mistakes, now."

But they had already made one.

Five blocks away, at a small café across the street from a popular deli, a man was staring down at coffee long gone cold, face pale and mind numb with shocked disbelief. Because he had seen Pride and the Child leave the deli, and he had recognized the face Pride wore.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Very short, I know. I had actually decided to let chapter 1 stand on it's own, but was eventually convinced to continue this. Please, tell me what you think worked and what you think didn't.


End file.
